01/21/2010

Out of the Frying Pan Part 1

Her“baby” was dying all around her.Trudy clutched the joystick and worked the foot pedals as hard as she could, but the chopper was dying and she along with it.

“Rogue One, going in,”she said into her comlink.“Sorry ,Jake. "

She was terrified, resigned and pissed. Her Samson banged against the rocks of a floating mountain and she was a sitting duck.There was no doubt in her mind what Quaritch was saying to his gunner. “Light her up.” She could imagine those hunter/killer eyes and his gleaming teeth. She could see in her mind's eye a brilliant orange fireball and herself instantly incinerated.

“Asshole,” she muttered.She was wondering if she’d been shot—her adrenalin was pumping so hard, she could have been dead already and not know it. Hell, that’s what happened to Grace Augustine.

She looked around.Split seconds to live. No parachute.A fall of a thousand feet. If she could dive under the oncoming fire, she might be able to land the bird, but the gyros were gone and one of the engines was on fire. If she could only get out of chopper before it blew, where would she go? She took one hand from the failing rudder and grabbed an exopack.

The roots and rocks of a floating mountain were within a hand’s reach of her.Could she do it?

In a desperate move, she blew the cockpit hatch, unbuckled, and heaved herself out of the cockpit.She grabbed some roots and for one heart stopping moment, thought she had only grabbed air.Desperate and blind now by sheer animal terror, she scrambled for the vines and rocks with all four limbs.The chopper fell away from her.It had banged and bumped the floating boulder in its death throes, and the rock had been turned so that Trudy was shielded from the final explosion.

The world turned to a deafening roar .Flames licked at the roots and vines of her rock.Even through her exopack she could smell the fuel and scorched metal.Her chopper disintegrated and fell to the forest floor.

For a moment she thought her exopack had been blown off her face, but that was only her gasping for air in short, ragged, high pitched squeaks.Then she realized was not gasping at all, but sobbing.She was tangled thoroughly in the roots and the vines and was paralyzed with fear.

And then it came to her.

“I’m not dead,” she thought.She said it aloud. “I’m not dead.”

She did not move.The boulder was rotating and she could be exposed again to enemy fire.The blood pounding in her ears drowned out the sound of battle.

She reached for the throat mike throat but there was nothing there.In the mad scramble, it had come off, and her earpiece as well. She was cut off from Jake and the others.

She was beyond knowing what was going on with the battle in the sky and on the ground.She had a sidearm, but she was a thousand feet in the air, clinging to a floating rock.All she could do was see if she could hoist herself up to a less precarious perch and maybe tie in – those rocks tilted and turned something awful.She’d heard that one had turned upside down once and tossed some miners off of it.

She tried to move.She had been clutching the vines with such force, her muscles were cramped.She tried to move again.Something wasn’t working right.Her left arm.

She looked at her arm. “Oh, that’s gonna hurt,” she thought.

There was blood and black soot.She was either burned, shot, or both.Either way,the adrenalin was wearing off and she was not in control of her left arm.

And when she took a breath her ribs hurt.She didn’t think she’d been shot—more like some kind of concussive blow from the explosion. Or maybe she was shot.Or maybe internal injuries from the force of theexplosion when the chopper went up.

Best not to think along those lines, she told herself.d

The rock swayed in the air.She was aware of gunfire, the shrieks of the banshees.Something huge swooped past her.Jake and the Leonopteryx. She wanted to pump a fist in the air and yell in triumph but all she could do was gape in awe.

If she could only get to something less precarious.If she could avoid bleeding to death.

Very slowly, she inched up the face of the boulder.It was gently swaying towards a larger, more stable cliff with a ledge.She was shaking so badly, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to make the move, but she also knew she had to get to a safer position.She used her own weight lik ea kid on a swing set to influence her rock enough to get her into position as it ground against the more stable formation.Using her three remaining limbs, Trudy transferred herself, and crawled, trembling, weeping and cursing, onto a flat, grassy ledge where she rolled as far away from the edge of the cliff as she could and lay on her back cursing heaven, hell, Quaritch, Pandora,and anyone else she could think of.

The pain did not come on slowly – it came on all at once.As the adrenalin wore off, the pain swept over her as a blanket of fire.Her arm.Her ribs.The side of her face.Screaming, “Shit!” a dozen times, she managed to get herself to a sitting position to take a damage report.

Then she realized she was not alone.A sinister, blue and mauve monster hovered nearby, and snapped its half yard long teeth at her.Blood trickled from bullet wounds on the beast’s shoulders. A banshee. A wounded banshee. The rider, a woman, was dead and the banshee was guarding its slain rider. The rider had been strafed with so much machine gun fire one arm was almost severed. Trudy would have thought the banshee would just fly off, but clearly the animal was not capable of flight. It lumbered on its foreclaws and hissed at her.

Trudy Chacon was trapped a thousand feet in the air with an angry, wounded flesh eating monster

But she was alive.For how much longer she had no idea.But for now, she was alive.